Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Supporting a #language

There is a #Wikipedia in 280+ languages. However, not all languages are equal. Some of the languages are not recognised as languages. From a support point of view this is not good. We prefer to make use of information that is available in standards. When the standard bodies have accepted information about a language, we can be relatively certain that what we do will be exactly what is done by other applications.

For the "Normandian" Wikipedia, the language is not recognised. It does not mean that there is no support possible or available. The language can be localised at translatewiki.net. The language falls back to English but looking at the text, it may be better to have French as a fall back language. It is unlikely that we know about special needs like plural or if we need to address women using the grammatical female form.

We are reaching out to all our languages and we we aim to provide proper support to all of them. With "Nourmande" it is extremely obvious that we do not know what to do. It is unlikely that any of us has the literature that answers these questions and really, as each of our Wikipedias must have people knowing enough of their language to support us.